1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to power distributions of an electronic device and more particularly, to a method of real-time temperature and power mapping of fully operating electronic devices such as microprocessors and alike.
2. Description of the Related Art
As power densities of electronic devices, including active, passive and highly integrated circuits continue to increase, low-power designs and pre-silicon modeling tools are becoming increasingly crucial for electronic device development. The ability to continue to improve chip and system performance for future products will directly depend on the development of an understanding of power dissipation and thermal distributions. Towards this end, a key technical challenge involves the optimization of circuit designs and software tools to avoid excessive power consumption and non-uniformities in the heat load.
While substantial progress in modeling of temperature and power distributions of electronic devices has been made, detailed and quantitative experimental measurements for verifying these models and the resulting design rules are not available. In order to address these shortcomings, a need exists for “real-time” temperature and power mapping of fully operating electronic device chips. The commonly assigned, co-pending U.S. application Ser. No. 10/699,399 now [Pending], filed on Oct. 30, 2003 entitled “Transparent Cooling Duct” with is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. Further is the commonly assigned, co-pending U.S. application Ser. No. 10/699,123 now [Pending], filed on Oct. 30, 2003 entitled “Thermal Measurement of Electronic Devices During Operation” with which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. Neither the nor the patent applications expressly disclose how to convert the measured temperature distributions to power distributions.